Robert Macfarlane says we are losing the best descriptive words for our landscape. This matters, he says, "because language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. To quote the American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry – a man who in my experience speaks the crash-tested truth – “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”"
posted by purplesludge
on Feb 27, 2015 -
23 comments

Shortly after meeting my wife, she introduced me to the nuanced meaning that the Spanish word nervio had acquired in the lexicon of her family. As used in their Chilean home, the word could be defined as a feeling of such intense affection that one trembles or grits his teeth with restraint so as not to harm the object of his affection. I have heard others allude to the sensation in seemingly bizarre phrases such as, "It's so cute [that] I want to squeeze it to death." I often ask people about nervio. For those like me who have experienced it frequently throughout their lives, a complete definition is unnecessary and the word fills a void in their vocabulary. With others, my description is often greeted with bewilderment. Having never felt such a sensation, it is hard for them to imagine.

Or so say researchers in a new study in the February 9 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Here's their paper's abstract: "Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora
in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence
of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that
(i) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity
bias, (ii) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent
between languages under translation, and (iii) this positivity bias
is strongly independent of frequency of word use. Alongside these
general regularities, we describe interlanguage variations in the
emotional spectrum of languages that allow us to rank corpora.
We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct
physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement
of the emotional content of large-scale texts."
And here are descriptions of the research in Science Daily and the LA Times.
posted by Sir Rinse
on Feb 10, 2015 -
43 comments

You Don’t Say? is a campaign founded by senior Daniel Kort and juniors Anuj Chhabra, Christie Lawrence and Jay Sullivan that aims to raise student awareness about the offensive nature of phrases and slurs used in everyday conversation through photographs shared using an online campaign. Starting Jan. 7, the group began to roll out its second online push, only this time instead of 17 students, the project featured 41 Duke student-athletes.

“Sports are really integral to our campus culture, and with that comes a pretty big microphone around our athletic culture,” Kort said. “It’s easier to dismiss a message if it’s coming from a social justice-oriented group on campus…. By getting people who aren’t traditionally seen as the social justice kids on campus to stand up for this message, it carries a lot more weight. It’s also that these student-athletes care a lot about the issues.”

Texas is bro country. But the term also covers the entirety of Oklahoma, and almost all of Louisiana and Arkansas, plus good chunks of Kansas and New Mexico. A mid-sized gathering of bros straddles the Michigan-Indiana border, and a tiny bro community lives by the seaside on either side of the Virginia-North Carolina state line.

The excellent Copenhagenize blog presents a short glossary of idioms, in Danish and a few other languages, that are semantically derived from cycling terminology.
posted by threeants
on Dec 12, 2014 -
11 comments

"Bad Translator" takes any English text input, pings it back and forth on a translation engine through a few other languages, and outputs the result, again in English, but... different. It's like a robot game of "Telephone."

...5 translations later, SDL gives us:

To bad door of translator of the sounds the given English of the text, that of a long time an in extend in a motor of translation through someone the other languages and the result go, again in the English, but outside of of... contraryly. This is like a game of the automaton of telephones.

Spanglish is not random. It is not simply a piecemeal cobbling-together, a collecting of scraps of random vocabulary into a raggedy orphan of a sentence. It has logic and rules, and more interestingly and importantly, it embodies a constantly shifting and intimate morphology of miscegenation. It is the mix of my husband’s innate Mexicanness and my innate Americanness, of my adaptive Mexicanness and his adaptive Americanness, in Spanish and English morphemes that come neatly together and apart like so many Legos into new and ever-changing constructions.
posted by ellieBOA
on Nov 2, 2014 -
23 comments

Essays and longer texts written in English can provide interesting insights into the linguistic background of the writer, and about the history of other languages, even dying languages, when evaluated by a new computer program developed by a team of computer scientists at MIT and Israel’s Technion. As told on NPR, this discovery came about by accident, when the new program classified someone as Russian when they were Polish, due to the similarity in grammar between the languages. Researchers realized this could allow the program to re-create language families, and could be applied to people who currently may not speak their original language, allowing some categorization of dying languages. More from MIT, and a link to the paper (PDF, from the 2014 Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics).
posted by filthy light thief
on Oct 1, 2014 -
6 comments

The curse of knowledge is a major reason that good scholars write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to them that their readers don’t know what they know—that those readers haven’t mastered the patois or can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention or have no way to visualize an event that to the writer is as clear as day. And so they don’t bother to explain the jargon or spell out the logic or supply the necessary detail.
Obviously, scholars cannot avoid technical terms altogether. But a surprising amount of jargon can simply be banished, and no one will be the worse for it.

Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying); “timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven. In Malawi’s Chichewa language, which has 10m speakers, “cached pages” became mfutso wa tsamba, or bits of leftover food. The windowless houses of the 440,000 speakers of Zapotec, a family of indigenous languages in Mexico, meant that computer “windows” became “eyes”.

Movies and television shows often reflect cultural trends of the time they are made in. Even movies that take place during the past or future can say something about the present through metadata or production style. Using the Bookworm platform, Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, provides a tool that lets you see trends in movie and television dialogue.

The thing about ableism is that it’s everywhere, and it’s incredibly common, and we don’t even realize it. It’s in the books we read, and in our daily lives. Ableism is that belief that everyone who is able-bodied is “normal” and everyone else is abnormal. Abelism is probably one of the most common kinds of –ism’s, and it rarely gets talked about.

[T]his is what we were dealing with: We were located in two places, and between us there were three laptops and one stenography machine. We were working in two languages (English and American Sign Language, or ASL) and across three communication channels (voice, sign, and text). They were sitting at a rectangular table, all on the same side: first Hilaria, then Kate, then Lynn, then Rabin´. That made five of us, four of whom brought constraints to the situation, ranging from the permanent to the temporary: Lynn is deaf, Hilaria is a non-native speaker of English, Rabin´ is supposed to be silent and invisible, and I couldn’t see, because I had no video on my Skype.

"No wonder we react so viscerally to the 'ching-chong, ching-chong' schoolyard taunt. To attack our language, our ability to sound 'normal,' is to attack our ability to be normal. It's to attack everything we've worked for." An essay by Arthur Chu on feigning a Chinese accent for work and ridding oneself of an accent for life. [more inside]
posted by Errant
on Aug 1, 2014 -
54 comments

Practice with Pronouns is a site that lets you practise subject, object, possessive, and reflexive forms of English third person pronouns. It comes with a few of the most common options, but you can also fill in whatever pronouns you like. Useful for both English learners and people wanting to practise using nonbinary pronouns.

The Editorial Team of Substance Abuse make[s] an appeal for the use of language that (1) Respects the worth and dignity of all persons (“people-first language”), (2) Focuses on the medical nature of substance use disorders and treatment, (3) Promotes the recovery process, and (4) Avoids perpetuating negative stereotype biases through the use of slang and idioms.
We ask authors, reviewers, and readers to carefully and intentionally consider the language used to describe alcohol and other drug use and disorders, the individuals affected by these conditions, and their related behaviors, comorbidities, treatment, and recovery in our publication. [more inside]
posted by rtha
on Jul 19, 2014 -
43 comments

31 Adorable Slang Terms for Sexual Intercourse from the Last 600 Years Lexicographer Jonathon Green’s comprehensive historical dictionary of slang, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, covers hundreds of years of jargon, cant, and naughty talk. He has created a series of online timelines (here and here) where the words too impolite, indecent, or risqué for the usual history books are arranged in the order they came into fashion. (If you don’t see any words on the timelines, zoom out using the bar on the right.) We’ve already had fun with the classiest terms for naughty bits. Here are the most adorable terms for sexual intercourse from the last 600 or so years.
posted by mikeand1
on Jul 18, 2014 -
30 comments

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